Precarious
The Lives of Migrant Workers
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Globe 100 Best Book of 2025 • One of The Hill Times’ Top 100 Best Books in 2025 • Winner of the 2024 Dave Greber Freelance Writers Book Award
A series of profiles of foreign workers illuminates the precarity of global systems of migrant labor and the vulnerability of their most disenfranchised agents.
In 2023, after weeks of investigation, United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoyo Obokata came to a scathing conclusion: Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program is “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” Workers complained of excessive hours and unpaid overtime; of being forced to perform dangerous tasks or ones not specified in their contracts; of being physically abused, intimidated, and sexually harassed; and of overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions that deprived them of their privacy and dignity.
In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, Marcello Di Cintio ranges across the country speaking to those who have come from elsewhere to till our fields, bathe our elderly, and serve us our Double Doubles, uncovering stories of tremendous perseverance, resilience, and humanity, but also of precarity and vulnerability. He shows that vast swathes of our economy depend on the work of people we don’t see, while expanding our awareness of what migrant work now entails, and revealing that our mistreatment of the most vulnerable among us diminishes our own dignity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thorough and damning account from journalist Di Cintio (Driven) profiles migrant workers who traveled to Canada from Costa Rica, India, and the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker program and found themselves subjected to inhumane and dangerous working conditions. Delving into the history of the program, which was founded in 1973, and its inner workings, he argues that it is inherently flawed, as it allows the workers to be drastically taken advantage of due to restrictions that keep them from moving jobs and, in some instances, from receiving medical care. While some business owners and other stakeholders Di Cintio speaks with concede that "our migrant labour system allows bad actors to act badly," Di Cintio goes further, arguing that "the problem isn't a few bad apples," and that the system is in fact working as designed, in a punitive and harmful manner. He does so via tangential explorations of the exploitative situations faced by other migrants ranging from foreign students studying in Canada to human-trafficking victims. While offering precise and useful insights into the Canadian system, Di Cintio also provides rich food for thought about the role migration plays in the global order. It's worth a look for anyone concerned about the harsh treatment of migrants.
